Modeling answerer behavior in collaborative question answering systems

Abstract

A key functionality in Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) systems is the assignment of the questions from information seekers to the potential answerers. An attractive solution is to automatically recommend the questions to the potential answerers with expertise or interest in the question topic. However, previous work has largely ignored a key problem in question recommendation - namely, whether the potential answerer is likely to accept and answer the recommended questions in a timely manner. This paper explores the contextual factors that influence the answerer behavior in a large, popular CQA system, with the goal to inform the construction of question routing and recommendation systems. Specifically, we consider when users tend to answer questions in a large-scale CQA system, and how answerers tend to choose the questions to answer. Our results over a dataset of more than 1 million questions draw from a real CQA system could help develop more realistic evaluation methods for question recommendation, and inform the design of future question recommender systems.